Smoke And Mirrors

Only the End of the World Again

Steve Jones and I have been friends for fifteen years. We even edited a book of nasty poems for kids together. This means that he gets to ring me up and say things like "I'm doing an anthology of stories set in H. P. Lovecraft's fictional town of Innsmouth. Do me a story."

This story came from a number of things coming together (that's where we writers Get Our Ideas, in case you were wondering). One of them was the late Roger Zelazny's book A Night in the Lonesome October, which has tremendous fun with the various stock characters of horror and fantasy: Roger had given me a copy of his book a few months before I came to write this story and I'd enjoyed it enormously. At about the same time, I was reading an account of a French werewolf trial held 300 years ago. I realised while reading the testimony of one witness that the account of this trial had been an inspiration for Saki's wonderful story "Gabriel-Ernest" and also for James Branch Cabell's short novel The White Robe, but that both Saki and Cabell had been too well brought up to use the thro wing-up of the fingers motif, a key piece of evidence in the trial. Which meant that it was now all up to me.

Larry Talbot was the name of the original Wolfman, the one who met Abbott and Costello.

And there was that man Steve Jones again. "I want you to write one of your story poems for me. It needs to be a detective story set in the near future. Maybe you could use the Larry Talbot character from 'Only the End of the World Again'."

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of "Baywatch". So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of "Baywatch" for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do.

Look, I don't give you grief over where you get your ideas from.